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The Mystic Massacre of 1637 was a brutal attack by English colonists and their Narragansett/Mohegan allies on the Pequot village near the Mystic River during the Pequot War, where they burned the fort, killing hundreds (400-700) of Pequots, mostly women, children, and elders, decisively crippling the Pequot Nation and ending their dominance in the region -
The "Scalp Act (1749)" refers to a notorious proclamation by Nova Scotia Cornwallis, offering bounties for Mi'kmaq scalps (men, women, and children) to clear the land for British settlement during War, a key part of the conflict in the region, though it was officially rescinded in 1752, its legacy and the broader history of scalp bounties by British colonies highlight systemic efforts to drive out Indigenous peoples through violence and reward scalping as a tool of exterminatin -
The 3/5ths Compromise of 1787, reached at the U.S. Constitutional Convention, determined that for representation and taxation, three out of every five enslaved people would count towards a state's total population, granting Southern states disproportionate power in the House of Representatives and Electoral College, while reinforcing slavery's political influence until the Civil War -
The slave trade ended in the United States in January when the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves went into effect, making it illegal to bring enslaved Africans into the country. This significant act, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, closed the legal transatlantic slave trade but did not end slavery itself or the booming domestic slave trade, which forcibly moved enslaved people within the U.S. for decades until the Civil War. -
a decisive U.S. victory led by Governor William Henry Harrison against Tecumseh's confederacy of Native American tribes near Prophetstown, Indiana, crippling their resistance and escalated tensions that contributed to the War of 1812. Harrison, aiming to destroy the tribal alliance -
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a U.S. law that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, maintaining the balance of power in Congress, and prohibited slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the 36°30′ parallel. Spearheaded by Henry Clay, it temporarily resolved the debate over slavery's expansion but ultimately failed, being repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and -
The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Native Americans of the "Five Civilized Tribes", including their black slaves, between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. -
The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson, authorized the U.S. government to forcibly relocate tens of thousands of Native Americans (like the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek) from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River to territory west of the river (present-day Oklahoma) in exchange for land and supplies, but it led to devastating forced marches, most famously the "Trail of Tears," resulting in thousands of deaths from disease -
Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831 was a violent slave uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, led by the enslaved preacher Nat Turner, who believed he was divinely ordained to free his people, resulting in the deaths of around 55 white people and sparking widespread fear and brutal retaliation, leading to harsher slave codes and intensifying the national debate over slavery. -
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, was a stringent federal law that required all U.S. citizens, including those in free states, to assist in capturing and returning escaped enslaved people, making it a federal offense to obstruct their return. It denied accused freedom seekers due process, imposed harsh penalties (fines, jail) on those who aided them, and incentivized commissioners to return people to bondage, sparking outrage and violent resistance -
The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision denied enslaved African American Dred Scott his freedom, ruled that Black people were not and could never be U.S. citizens, and declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, effectively stating Congress couldn't ban slavery in territories, intensifying national divisions over slavery and pushing the country closer to the Civil War -
The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War, declared enslaved people in Confederate states to be free, transforming the war into a fight for liberation, adding moral weight to the -
The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as a punishment for a crime, effectively ending the institution after the Civil War. Passed by Congress in January 1865 and signed by President Lincoln, it was the first of the Reconstruction Amendments, granting Congress the power to enforce its provisions and paving the way for future civil rights -
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, is a cornerstone of U.S. civil rights, granting citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" (including formerly enslaved people) and guaranteeing all citizens "equal protection of the laws" and "due process of law" from state governments, fundamentally reshaping American law by extending federal protections against state infringement of individual rights